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Acceptance of Working Moms and Stay-At-Home Dads at All-Time High

by Maura Hohman on June 29, 2015

Maura Hohman

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Whether you stay at home with your little one or work outside the home, you undoubtedly have challenges to face and priorities to balance. If you’re the among the latter, you’re familiar with the struggles that are unique to working parents — from balancing business meetings with birthday parties and conference calls with piano concerts — and, of course, always wishing you could spend more time with your kids. What’s more, despite the millions of people who do this dance daily (70 percent of women with children under 18 are part of the workforce), there’s less of a support system for these challenges in the United States than in other countries. (The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that doesn’t require paid maternity leave, and millions of American workers are unable to use their sick days to care for a child.)

The good news is, American society might be finally starting to catch up. In addition to a few bills on the floor of Congress that could turn some of policy problems around, an even better predictor of progress is a shift in societal attitudes: A new study shows acceptance of working parents is at an all-time high.

The study, published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, compared the results of nationwide, representative surveys that gathered the views of both adults and high school students in the 1970s and in the 2010s. By the 2010s, both the high schoolers and the adults had grown more supportive of working parents and increasingly disagreed with the notion that children and families would suffer if mothers worked outside the home.

For example, 59 percent of 12th graders in the 1970s thought toddlers suffered from their mothers working outside the home, compared to 22 percent in the 2010s. In the 2010s, 70 percent of 12th graders thought working mothers could have just as warm relationships with their children as non-working moms, up from 53 percent in the 1970s. And in the 1970s, 66 percent of adults thought the man should be the achiever outside the home and the woman should take care of the home and family, which dropped to 32 percent in the 2010s.

The researchers compared the attitudes of multiple generations, including Baby Boomers, GenXers and Millennials, and found that, as time went on, all of the groups favored more egalitarian relationships between men in women. In the 2010s, people are also more open to the idea of both parents working outside the home, and fathers working part-time or staying at home with the kids. Support of stay-at-home dads more than doubled between the 1970s and 2010s, from 17 percent to 41 percent.

More so than any other factor observed in the study, such as socioeconomic status and race, the year a person was surveyed was the strongest predictor of how he or she would side on an issue. That means that as time marches on, society as a whole becomes more supportive of working moms. It’s not just that people from certain demographic groups are more supportive than others.

The study authors also say that in the next decade, it’s likely that even more women will enroll in college and work full-time even after they have children. More women will probably also get married later and have children later. That means that as today’s teens — who overwhelmingly support working mothers — become working parents themselves, issues like universal childcare and job flexibility will become even more pressing.

So the results of this study might not feel real to you as you bounce your baby on your knee at one in the morning while responding, one-handed, to some last minute emails. But know that shifting attitudes often give way to real change in the lives of equally real people.

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